I have a birthday coming up in a couple of weeks and if you want to be really nice to me you could contact me about your experiences (and pictures) of old KaferPark, especially pictures from the 40s and 50s when it was walled in and hosted professional ball.

New Bern is a town that loves baseball. The River Rats (2005-2007) are not our only brief but beloved team. In Kafer Park’s heyday, minor league players batted, pitched and fielded while shouting fans downed Pepsi and popcorn and boys lined up along Cedar Grove Cemetery’s fabled marl wall hoping to catch a home run ball—that would gain them free admission to the game.

Actually, New Bern had its first professional team—with the North Carolina League—back in 1902. This was back in the days before Kafer Park existed—when that stretch of National Avenue was lined with low-income houses, waiting to be dynamited in the fire of 1922 (ah, that’s another story). This team was called the New Bern Truckers. I have no idea what would have inspired someone to name them the truckers. Gilbert Waters was still fiddling with his Buggymobile in that year and I doubt a lot of longhaul trucks were rolling about town. Maybe they were named for those “trucks” – non-motorized carts pulled by mules—that were used in harvesting tobacco.

The Truckers’ league included the Raleigh Red Birds, the Charlotte Hornets, the Greensboro Farmers, the Wilmington Sailors and the Durham Bulls.

I haven’t dug through old issues to see why yet, but the Truckers only played for one year.

The city returned to baseball with the Eastern Carolina League in 1908, then bowed out until 1937 when they found success and moderate longevity as the Bears with the Coastal Plain League. By now KaferPark was up and running and a Sunday afternoon at the ball park became a tradition in town. The league disbanded in 1941, when most of its players went to war (at least one, pitcher Leonard “Link” Berry, died when the troopship he rode—the Leopold—was sunk crossing the English Channel on Christmas Eve, 1944), but it got together again with the peace in 1946.

One of those players from 1940—Charles Whitaker, who led the team in batting at .344, is still living, so far as I can tell. When he was a player he lived in town, on North Craven Street.

We had some good years—we took championships in ‘38, ‘50 and ‘51.

Our opponents during those years had some odd names: the Goldsboro Goldbugs, the Greenville Greenies, the Snow Hill Billies and the Wilson Tobs among them.